Relevant information about some articles is often not obvious from the articles themselves, yet may be very important in making a good choice among them. This information often exists in databases or similar information stores, but it is difficult to access it at the moment a decision needs to be made.
Even when accessible, such information is often overwhelming, making useful comparison of information regarding available articles impracticable. Such is particularly true of collections of similar yet distinct articles, making distinctions between the articles not readily discernible.
For example, selecting a wine from a wine rack requires knowing a lot about each bottle of wine (which regions and varietals go particularly—or even just acceptably—well with a particular meal, which bottles carry which recommendations of experts, which bottles are currently considered ready to drink, etc.). Even when armed with such information, merely locating one or more bottles of wine with the desired characteristics can be a significant challenge in large wine cellars.
What is needed is a more tightly-coupled nexus between information about articles in a collection and the articles themselves.